Blinkey Light

This blog is inspired by a post from a fellow of mine.  Tony Dye is the IT guru for Perimeter Church, and his post below pretty much sums up my entire philosophy for network troubleshooting.

I can’t believe I never posted this before, but I went to reference it and couldn’t find it.  So, if you’ve heard this before, I’m sorry for being repetitious.

Sometime a number of years back, about the time we were getting ITDiscuss kicked off, a few of us were sitting around a table talking about network monitoring (bandwidth issues) and what tools we used.  There was a lot of silence.  Then somebody (may have been me) sheepishly admitted “I watch the blinkey lights.”  Kind of similar to the Roundtable discussion on network monitoring regarding “a lot of calls tells you things are really bad,” we sort of all came to the same conclusion — we look at our switches and use a highly scientific method of determining network traffic:

1. If the lights are all off, that’s bad
2. If the lights are on solid, that’s also bad
3. If the lights are blinking, not too fast, not too slow, then that’s good

Do you use the “blinkey light” method of monitoring your network utilization?

http://tonydye.typepad.com/main/2006/10/blinking_lights.html

 To sum up:

1. If the lights are all off, that’s bad

2. If the lights are on solid, that’s also bad
3. If the lights are blinking, not too fast, not too slow, then that’s good